Review
Compared with Peter Levi's learned, insightful Tennyson (p. 1370), Thorn's life of the poet is jourualistic - a series of short, anecdotal chapters devoted to tableaux or gossip - and is, despite its fast pace, out of tune with the character and achievement of his subject. The Tennyson revealed by British scholar Thorn is a popular poet whose lyrics, romances, and even his elegiac epic, In Memoriam, reflected the tastes and values of his readership. While elitist critics of the time dismissed Tennyson as childish, superficial, morbid, or sentimental, he was, Thorn emphasizes, the voice of Victorian England. On a personal level, he was haunted by his bleak and disordered childhood in a country rectory - and by drinking, madness, violence, insanity, melancholy, and an adolescence that extended until 1850, when, at age 40, he became poet laureate, married, and transformed his eccentricities - hypochondria, vulgar manners, excessive drinking and smoking, and bizarre costumes including a huge cape and wizard's hat - into something incidental and colorful. As for the gossip about his homosexuality, opium-addiction, womanizing, and epilepsy: Thorn presents it, however irrelevant, refuting some rumors and dismissing the rest as superfluous color in an already vivid life. In place of the subtle intellectual insights of Levi-the dignity of his Tennyson - Thorn offers some "laughable bathos" about Tennyson at home, beset by dental problems, marital rifts, and other petty problems that, the author points out, he shared with his readership. And in place of the vision, imagination, and vocation of Levi's Tennyson, Thorn refers to a "poetic impulse" that needed a "Kickstart." Levi and Thorn both recognize the disparity between the child and the man, the public and the private life - between the poetry and the person - but neither undertakes the psychological analysis that would relate them into a whole. Affable, familiar, sentimental - in fact, rather like Tennyson's worst reputation: popular, simplified, an impersonation rather than a representation. Read the Levi instead. (Kirkus Reviews)
Product Description
For most of the hundred years since his death, Alfred Lord Tennyson has not enjoyed a lively reputation. Critics who are happiest investing poets with greatness only if they are poor, tragic, overlooked and preferably all three have never forgiven Tennyson for being as instantly recognisable as Queen Victoria, an enormously popular poet laureate and for having the temerity to make huge amounts of money from his poetry while he was still alive. This biography redresses the balance. Shedding new light on Tennyson's life from cradle to deathbed, Michael Thorn takes us from his distinctly gothic childhood peppered by scenes of drunkenness, lunacy and violence through the years of prosperity and popularity to his still creative yet increasingly cantankerous old age. He tackles the subjects that previous biographers have shied away from: the rumours of Tennyson's drug addiction, epilepsy, sexual coldness and even madness that persist to this day. And placing his subject within the context of his era, he paints a detailed portrait of a complex man, innovative in his work, curiously dismissive of social graces, yet devoted to his family and obsessed by immortality, his health, and the lawns of his country home.
